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Saturday, July 23, 2016

When it comes to anything but craft supplies, I'm a serial thrower-away'er. If it sits on the table for more than a few minutes without finding a permanent home, into the trash it goes! This helps to keep the house clean of clutter but sometimes backfires (like when I throw away stuff we actually need :)).

Well, that's never going to be an issue again because I'm transitioning from a junk tosser to a junk hoarder, thanks to a Junk Journal swap I recently participated in on Craftster. The challenge was to make a blank journal from junk that our partners could fill up however they want!

Junk journals are just what they sound like, journals made from pages of junk!! I stockpiled crap from the mailbox, magazine bins, ephemera collections and scrap piles, made signatures out of them and used coptic binding to make them into a book, of sorts.

Some pages I left as they were for the future owner to embellish as they wish. Others, I painted with gesso or acrylics and decorated with washi tape, burlap, lace and other bits and bobs for my partner to build on however they saw fit. I tried to stick with a red and white theme throughout to bring some symmetry to the otherwise completely random assortment of junk.

My partner likes ATCs so I put some blank cards throughout the journal that she could alter later.

I used old grocery bags for the cover that I had soaked, crinkled up, dried and then ironed for a junky looking texture. I glued the paper to thin cardboard to make the front, back and spine of the journal. I added a piece of twill tape as another tuck spot and slid in a gessoed bingo card that my partner can decorate as she wishes.

This was such a fun swap and a great excuse to make a HUGE mess in my craft room. And since my craft room is already destroyed, I figure I might as well make a couple more junk journals!!